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Introduction THIS essay explores science as a political technique and the place of scientific knowledge in the dynamics of a postsocialist transition by taking the management of the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe as a case in point. I begin with a brief exploration of three ways of conceiving of science as political technique: science as repression, science as a forging of a cosmopolitan ethos, and science as a way of rooting people in political regimes. Variations on these approaches informed the management of Chernobyl during the Soviet period and in the post-Soviet period of nation-state building, and this Soviet and post-Soviet management has significantly shaped the experiential, legal, and biological aspects of the disaster’s aftermath. While, for example, in the Soviet period of the disaster’s management 31 people were said to have died, during the post-Soviet management of the disaster, more than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone claim to be suffering from the disaster’s effects. The web of scientific, political, and social interests behind this stark numerical contrast is explored here. In mapping environmental contamination , measuring individual and population-wide exposures, and arbitrating claims of illness, the biological effects of Chernobyl became inseparable from the political interventions that were meant to contain them. Scientifically informed policies recast the aftermath as a complex political and technical experience in which administrators and affected people alike negotiSOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003) Science and Citizenship under Postsocialism ADRIANA PETRYNA ated the scale of the aftermath, forms of remediation and compensation , and claims to social equity and human rights. These processes had their own bureaucratic and legal contours and exemplify how science supports a field of political and moral agency through which the dynamics of postsocialist state-building , democratization, and citizenship can be understood. Aftermath In writing the troubled history of genetics, German scientist Benno Muller-Hill observes that in the twentieth century, “the rise of genetics was characterized by a gigantic process of repression” (Muller-Hill cited in Nelkin and Tancredi 1989). This model of science as repression was most catastrophically exemplified by the Nazi deployment of biology as its program of scientific racism became the very foundation of the Nazi state (Staatsraison; see Proctor, 1988: 45). In his chilling condemnation of the prewar German scientific community that legitimated Nazi racial theories, historian of science Robert Proctor wrote that for many German scientists and politicians, Nazism was treated as an “applied biology ” (Proctor, 1988: 7). Soviet dissident scientists who suffered from Soviet state repression claimed a different purpose for science : as a guarantor of freedom and as the human right to engage in the pursuit of knowledge, uncontaminated by political interference . Such claims to freedom from state repression through science were reinforced by the idea that scientists have the natural right to physical mobility and an independence from authorities because of their membership in a particular vocational order: science . This cosmopolitan community claimed to be distinct from cultural politics and national claims of origin. The extent to which dissident scientists were actually free of the exigencies of inhospitable , indeed life-threatening, times and places is captured well in Andrei Sakharov’s recollection of himself observing columns of political prisoners being brutally marched to work at Azamas 16 552 SOCIAL RESEARCH (an atomic weapons research establishment run by the ruthless head of the Soviet secret police, Lavrenti Beria). At the same time, he sat at his desk developing the Tokamak model of controlled nuclear fusion (Graham, 1998: 69). A second model of science to be gleaned from the Soviet experience is not disconnected from the preceding model and is what I will call nativist. Trofim Lysenko epitomizes this Soviet nativist model of science widely regarded as false and as drastically retarding social and technical progress. In the 1930s, when the agricultural revolution based in modern genetics in the West was under way, Lysenko spearheaded what many observers considered to be a “catastrophe of Soviet biology” (Graham 1993:4). Denying the existence of the gene, Lysenko promoted methods of accelerating crop growth and yields through vernalization, a labor-intensive process whereby the flowering of plants (particularly wheat) can be induced or accelerated...

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